Pragmatik, Semantik, Syntax

Unterpunkt zu: Zeichentheorien: Übersicht

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Darstellung des gr. Zusammenhangs Mit dem Oberbegriff „Zeichen“ kommt das Tripel „Pragmatik“, „Semantik“ und „Syntax“ ins Blickfeld: unterschiedlich weit gespannte Fragestellungen zu Aspekten von Zeichen(systemen), durch die sich letztlich die spezifische Differenz von Bildern bestimmen lassen sollte. Am umfassendsten angelegt, beschäftigt sich eine pragmatische Untersuchung mit dem Komplex aus Kommunikations- und damit zusammenhängenden anderen Handlungen, d. h. der Einbettung der Zeichenhandlung in die Lebenspraxis der Zeichenverwender. Restriktiver in ihrem Gegenstandsbereich, bringt die Semantik die für die Zeichenverwendung relevanten Beziehungen zwischen Zeichenträger und dem Dargestellten zur Sprache, ohne dabei die Zeichenhandlung insgesamt zu betrachten. Syntaktische Untersuchungen beschäftigen sich, streng genommen, nur noch mit den Beziehungen, die zwischen den Zeichenträgern eines Zeichen­systems bestehen, also mit Relationen zwischen und Eigenschaften von (physischen) Gegenständen. Der Untersu­chungsbereich, die Menge der Gegenstände, die als Zeichenträger eines Systems in Frage kommen, kann gleichwohl nur pragmatisch – mit Blick auf das gesamte System der Zeichenhandlungen – angegeben werden. Engere Begriffsbestimmung Pragmatik As the most complete one of the three, a pragmatic investigation deals with the complex formed by a communication act and the other related acts (of communication or of any other sort), i.e., the embedding of the sign act in the “living practice” of the sign users. Which other act or behavior can or must precede a certain sign act? Which others may or have to follow? That, for example, the utterance of an assertion can be answered either immediately by an accepting or refusing (doubting) act of communication of the interlocutor, or by first performing a referential anchoring with corresponding sensory-motor test routines, this is the structure of that particular “language game”, and hence a theme of pragmatics. The field of pragmatics has been characterized in the beginning of this chapter as the investigation of the complex formed by a communication act and the other related behavior, i.e., the embedding of the sign act in the “living practice” of the sign users. Indeed, semantics in the traditional sense – i.e., an investigation apart from pragmatics and restricted to those relations between sign vehicle and sign meaning that are independent from the sign act, its participants, and their further behavior – must remain relatively sterile. Even the transcription of meaning components into verbal expressions used above relates the picture use to another sign behavior. Furthermore, a valid theory of resemblance can be reasonably founded only with respect to the behaviors of those experiencing a similarity, as has been sketched in Chapter 3. If resemblance is taken as a basic ingredient of pictorial semantics, semantic considerations are necessarily “contaminated” with the pragmatic perspective. Correspondingly, a broader conception of semantics has already been used throughout the preceding section: that conception views semantics as a part of pragmatics, and more precisely, as the part focusing on what is mentioned as being signified by means of the picture vehicle by the sign user. The relations to spatial reasoning and argumentation theory mentioned in that context clearly demonstrate this shift of perspective. We might think of classical semantics as the reduced pragmatics of a soliloquy (rather than the “God’s eye view” semanticists have often supported). Since it is not the picture (or more generally: the sign) that shows or represents something: it is the picture (or sign) user who shows or represents something with the sign. In soliloquy, one directs and keeps one’s own focus of attention by means of the sign on something that is usually not actually present. The discussion in Chapter 3 indicates that signs of the level of communication that includes propositions are in fact the only tools we have for performing such a peculiar behavior. However, those signs are more generally used to communicate with somebody else: to direct and keep the focus of attention of a communicative partner on something. That is in particular: for allowing her or him to perform some behavior linked with the signified entity or to coordinate such a behavior with behaviors of the sender of the message. The net of relations between the sign act and those behaviors is meant by “the embedding of the sign act in the living practice of the sign users”; it forms the focus of interest of pragmatics. Semantik More restrictive in its perspective, semantics focuses on the relations between sign vehicle and what is represented by means of it – as far as those relations are relevant for the sign use and can be investigated essentially without looking at the pragmatics of the sign act. Expressive or appellative aspects of sign uses are not taken into account. Usually, such relations are subsumed under the expression “meaning”. The links between a definite description (“this blurred photo”) and the object referred to, between a certain part of the distribution of color on a screen and the face depicted, or between a particular arm movement and a child’s emotional state are typical examples for the “objects” semantics is interested in. From a strictly semanticist point of view, indexical signs offer causality, and iconic signs similarity as candidates for a non-pragmatic meaning relation. Following the linguistic turn, it is now widely accepted that the concept of a strictly semantic investigation of meaning is ill-formed (with the exception of formal and artificial languages), and that semantics forms a special part of pragmatics focusing on the representational aspects of sign acts. Semantics in computational visualistics adds those features to the data structure around the type »image« that deal particularly with representational aspects of pictures. There are, in fact, two facetts of representation to be covered: by considering the “picture content” we focus on those properties of the picture vehicle that are relevant for understanding its significance in the sign act – our abilities to recognize pixemes as something more than patches of texture, so to speak. If we mention “the referent of a picture” we mean the individual scenes, events, objects, facts, etc. that the picture is taken to represent. Since we consider them as intentional objects, i.e., only as far as somebody experiences, recognizes, knows them, the referents may be factual or fictitious. They depend on the picture content. Therefore, picture content is our main focus of attention in this section. For the sake of simplicity, picture contents may be transcribed as predicative partial expressions, e.g., “being a large red suspension bridge spanning over water to a hilly countryside”, while nominative partial ex­pressions are used to mention picture referents: e.g., “the Golden Gate Bridge”. That replacement by means of verbal expressions is, of course, necessary because we cannot deal here with contents or referents directly. We can use linguistics again to inspire our attention. One rather stable distinction in linguistic semantics – though often appearing under different names – is that between reference semantics and intra-lexical semantics: researchers in the latter framework concentrate their efforts on circumscribing the representational aspects of verbal expressions in an explicit and formal manner. The content of an expression, sentence or text is then given in a meta-language.1 A relation to extra-linguistic entities (vulgo: the world) is not considered in any direct form. Computational linguistics, the older sister discipline of computational visualistics, uses such translations as the internal representation of the meaning of sentences or texts in a computer. In the form of operational semantics, they are employed together with translation routines and transformation algorithms for simulating the understanding and generating of natural language. Linguists dealing with reference semantics try to ground the meaning of verbal expressions in the world, in particular by investigating the role of contexts: at least those terms dealing with concrete, spatio-temporally extended and localizable affairs are usually understood as being anchored in non-verbal experiences. Assumedly, the reference relation, which associates each expression with its (usually) non-verbal “thing”, is mentally mediated. Essentially, it is perception that gives access to contexts, and thus supplies the needed referents. By and large, visual perception is used as a paradigmatic case for studying reference semantics. We come back to the operational form of reference semantics in Section 4.3.2, as it determines an important part of computer vision. As indicated above, a first approach to semantics of pictures is something analogous to intra-lexical semantics: a translation of the meaning components into a meta-language – indeed the same type of logical meta-languages used for verbal expressions. Such an approach has often been criticized: importing the categories of verbal signs for analyzing perceptoid signs may be inadequate. However, a proper “intra-pictorial semantics” has not been proposed, not even in a sketchy form. The idea of a translation of a picture’s meaning components into other pictures on a meta-level – perhaps the “pictures of the mind“? – appears not to be really promising for scientific purposes. On the other hand, transferring the conception of reference semantics directly to pictures is complicated, as well, if we take into account that images have the prime function of context building: they provide the (absent) contexts that contain the referents for verbal expressions. Using verbal interpretations as a mediating link is a quite plausible solution in particular because computational visualists deal essentially with the concepts forming image content, not with the thing per se. Whatever is to be represented by pictures has to be covered in the essence in the generic data structure by some – presumably relatively unspecific – data types, which we may call »picture content« (and »picture referent« respectively). A representation relation Rep associates an instance of »image« to one (or perhaps even several) instance(s) of »picture content«2 – a relation obviously of particular interest for computer vision algorithms and the determination of pixemes. The inverse projection relation Rep-1 has to be considered as a keystone of computer graphics and information visualization. Syntaktik / Syntax The syntactic domain of questions has the most restricted horizon as it deals, strictly speaking, only with the relations between the sign vehicles of a sign system. Since sign vehicles are essentially some physical objects used in a particular manner, syntactic investigations examine in consequence just the relations between and properties of physical objects. Representational, expressive or appellative aspects are ignored. The main focus of interest lies in determining the range of deviation of physical properties not changing the identity of a sign, and the rules of composition forming vehicles for complex signs from vehicles for simple signs. Obviously, the criteria used to distinguish one sign from the other can only be derived from the sign system as a whole, i.e., from a pragmatic point of view. optional Beispiele Auswirkungen auf andere Begriffe

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